Harvard Science Book Talk: Adam Becker, "More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity," in conversation with Max Gladstone and Moira Weigel

This "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.  
 
In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.  
 
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. 

Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was long-listed for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He lives in California.

Max Gladstone, Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus Award-winning author, has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This Is How You Lose the Time War. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect.

Moira Weigel is the Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and Faculty Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She has a PhD from Yale University, 2018, a MPhil from Cambridge University, 2008, and a BA, Harvard University, 2007. Her first book, Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating (2016) has been translated into six languages and appeared in dozens of outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and  HBO. Her second book, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff, Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020) has received positive reviews from The New York Times, Wired, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets, and was named one of Wired‘s “8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now”. 

Organization/Sponsor: Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store.
For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks.

Contact Info: science_lectures@fas.harvard.edu